Electric, exploding honeycombs in ‘Fractal ‘

I still can't solve this puzzle.

Growing up, my older brother was ever the math geek; he’s now a math teacher at a State University-funded high school that specializes in math and science. He taught me the beauty of the quadratic equation and the mystery of the imaginary number when I was a wee lad, giving me an academic advantage over my peers.

So when Christmas came, and my mother bought each of her children the obligatory “I think you’re interested in this”-themed calendar, the elder ‘dactyl would often find himself holding a Fractal-themed calendar. I always found myself mesmerized by these images. If you’ve never wasted an hour of your life looking at fractal art on the Internet, here’s my gentle nudge.

The idea of a never-ending pattern moving ever inward, or outward, is a great concept. Better yet if you can work this concept into a sleek, addictive block-based puzzle game. And that’s exactly what the budding studio “Cipher Prime” did.

This studio, located in Philadelphia (about a hundred miles east of Gameosaurus HQ), is perhaps better known for their new(er) iPad game PULSE. But in 2010, they released FRACTAL for PC and Mac. This past August they brought that game to the iPad, and now, it’s even available on Steam and the Mac Apps store. Its being on Steam was the final straw for me. Time to check it out, especially with all the buzz Pulse was getting.

On the surface, Fractal may not seem too special. You’re manipulating hexagon tiles on a hexagonal (honeycomb) board. The honeycomb itself, of course, is a kind of Fractal that continues to build on itself into more and more hexagons, but never with a smooth edge. But the mechanic of the game that makes it so different from everything I’ve yet played on a honeycomb board is the “Push” mechanism.

Pushing is, in fact, all you do in Fractal. And considering how addictive the game is (in one night I accidently dropped six hours on it), you may as well be “pushing” meth, not hexagons. But here’s how pushing works. You click (or “touch,” fancy iPad kids) an empty space adjacent to one or more colored hexagon tiles. If necessary, you can even click on the outer perimeter. The color tile that you’re pushing with (found in the bottom-right of the screen) will push out into the space of all previous Hexagons (if an adjacent space is empty, no pushing happens!). All other blocks are pushed forward one, until filling an empty space or, if tiles run to the outer (or inner!) perimeter, the last block falls off, never to be seen again.

The goal of Fractal is to make “blooms,” which are the basic seven-hexagon honeycomb pattern. You can make larger blooms (double, triple, even a 7x bloom) and you can have “chain reaction” blooms since the end effect of a bloom is to make the existing blocks disappear, push all adjacent tiles to the bloom one space, and then randomly throw down a few more tiles that might match. When I say “might match,” I should point out that the easier levels are monochromatic, but later the Hexagons take on different colors, and blooms only count when the seven Hexagons aligned are all the same color.

To summarize: flat-earth honeycomb, slide puzzles where you insert anywhere from one to six new tiles per move, limited moves to achieve certain goals. Oh, and there are power-ups: explosions (to knock out more tiles), and electricity (chains all adjacent same-colored tiles into a bloom). And there’s a painfully challenging puzzle mode. That’s the only thing I haven’t conquered. The “campaign” mode is the meat of the game, whereas puzzle mode is like a huge tapas menu of doom and despair.

The aesthetics make this heady game fairly palettable. A constant music track is running, but it has roughly a dozen layers that can fade in and out based on recent activities in the game. The beat slows down from its usual fast tempo (according to the press release, 130bpm) when you’re low on moves. It speeds back up if you can nail some “extra push” power-ups in some of your blooms. This and many other seamless audio transitions give the game a nice feel. The production value, for a small studio, is quite high. That’s all I’m trying to say here.

If this all sounds like a party waiting to happen, know that it’s only $7 to purchase, regardless of platform. If it sounds like a headache-inducing nightmare, then I’m guessing you’re the kind of person I conquered in TETRIS and DR. MARIO in my youth. Given that there are many of those people out there (yes, I am an elitist prick), I can see how the game may not be universally enjoyable. Your mileage may vary. For me, I had a pretty good time with it, but I’m not chomping at the bit to play more, if only because I know what it’ll do to my next night’s sleep.

Played: 10 hours
Platform(s): PC/Mac/iOS
Price: $6.99